Pinnacle Cart Review

Pinnacle Cart is one of the leading e-commerce platforms available today. Founded by Internet professionals who were evidently unsatisfied with existing online shopping carts, Pinnacle Cart has evolved over the years into an elegant system which provides solutions to questions before they’re asked, as well as the tools to bring wishes to fruition (in the e-commerce world, of course).

This shopping cart system was made with results in mind. Making e-commerce work is their motto and that isn’t simply some cheesy one-liner, it is truly the foundation on which this solution has been built measuring its success not from ease of use, or the number of features available, or the increase in quarterly revenues but rather from the results their clients are obtaining making Pinnacle Cart much more of a pleasant experience instead of a tedious chore.

Highlights

The first and most obvious advantage to using Pinnacle Cart is the fact that it lives up to its promise of being easy to use. While this was true in previous versions, this fact has become even more emphasized with the release of version 3.7.5. By easy to use we mean for everyone, programmers, optimizers and rookies alike. From the moment you sign up for your account you are given guidance presented in such an intuitive manner than you’re more than likely to complete half your storefront setup before you even take a break. Other shopping carts with similarly powerful backends are often and notoriously convoluted, if not downright intimidating. Pinnacle Cart sets a tone for their user’s experience that is consistent from their web design to the publishing of your online storefront. Every step leads to the next with an elegance that is refreshing and most certainly welcome.

Concerning the SEO value of this system, you need not worry about your product or category links filled with query strings. The ability to customize your page URLs is standard allowing you to set up your website the way you want it. Also included is the ability to add your meta titles and descriptions to every page. You can even auto generate your product meta descriptions from the product descriptions which is such a time-saver. Better still, you are offered the ability to set up naming schemes for products and category links, as well as generating alt tags from image names. This is a highly efficient way to provide all your imported products with search engine friendly links.

What is particularly useful is the ability to change your URLs to match your old online store’s links. Add to that the capability of editing your robots.txt file and adding ALT attributes to images and you have a company who focuses both on the bigger picture and the finer details of online visibility.

To attest to their broader view, the latest version of the Pinnacle Cart e-commerce solution extends the idea of optimization to more than just search engines. Newcomers can avoid fiddling with server files by adding their Google Analytics and Conversion codes right in the backend. Integration with the ever-popular MailChimp allows you to continue your interactions with your existing clients fostering loyalty and encouraging repeat customers. Yet it is the Drift Marketing, which allows you to contact users who have left your site without purchasing their items, that is decidedly attractive. Having visitors find your website, be able to easily shop and buy, and enticing visitors to return to your site in the future covers nearly every base there is.

Something we hadn’t anticipated seeing in major shopping carts until well into next year is the option to have social media network integration. Pinnacle Cart allows you to add not only Facebook and Twitter counters to your web storefront, but also plays well with other social media platforms such as Digg and Google Buzz providing users with an avenue to promote your wares by broadcasting them to wide and ever-expanding networks. Social commerce being a concept which is really taking hold with Internet strategists these days, it is excellent to see an e-commerce solution moving steadily in that direction and keeping pace.

Pinnacle Cart is a hosted solution but also allows those who prefer to run the software on their own server to do so, even going so far as to provide access to the source code. This range of access allows Pinnacle Cart to cater to everyone’s need from smaller online storefronts all the way up to powerful and dynamic corporate e-commerce portals. As you grow Pinnacle Cart will be able to be by your side every step of the way eliminating the growing pains of a successful web venture.

Limitations

Pinnacle Cart is lacking in many respects. It has many features that do not work well and are quite clunky. It does not look like these items will be fixed any time soon.

The system would be vastly improved if it’s multiple language option actually worked. Without multilingual options, such as the ability to easily create SEO-friendly versions of a e-commerce website without sacrificing online visibility, Pinnacle Cart is lacking, despoite its claims.

Overall

Take the Pinnacle Cart free trial to see if this e-commerce solution is good for you.

5 Comments on “Pinnacle Cart Review”

We own 4 pinnacle shopping carts and we have so many problems with the software and the pinnacle’s support. Issues with security, customers started seeing other customers accounts, pinnacle support response: we have to log in to our ftp and regularly empty sessiondata folder or this will happen again, what a joke. If and when there system is down (and it happens often) you can’t log in to your admin panel to process orders, last time there system crashed they lost two of our registrations and now we can only use two of the shopping carts, we don’t care because we are switching to CS-Cart much better and more secure shopping cart. Support is not free, email support is over $200 yearly. Installation instruction is missing information and it is very difficult to understand and you will not be able to upgrade with there help so you do have to pay for the support, 3 upgrades we experienced the same result errors and the site is down for days until the support gets to your support ticket. we give up we have spend so much time and money customizing poinnaclecart you will need an expired it is not user friendly at all. Don’t waste your time and money like we did with pinnaclecart.

Pinnacle looked very interesting until I discovered that it has essentially no Builtin Quickbooks integration. I do not consider a csv file ‘integration’. Nor is having to go to a third party for software. Too bad… I thought Pinnacle might be my solution. Oh .. Don’t bother with big commerce. Their implementation of web connector is ridiculous.

Pinnacle Cart isn’t the pinnacle of anything. It’s a piece of s*** software that has little to no flexibility. The experienced programmers I hired spent months trying to reverse engineer and fix all of the terrible problems that this cart has. I am paying around $100 per month for their hosting plan for nothing.

It’s 2013! There are many features that come standard (i.e., FREE, INCLUDED) in any modern e-commerce software that Pinnacle cart does not even offer! You can’t even customize your template. You get some terrible to work with interface that barely lets you do anything. Arg! When you look at their samples, it’s because people paid them a fortune to use their in-house templates but if you have your own design, forget it. You are screwed.

There were so many features that we were promised and assured, especially since they brag about offering them on their website. Well, it was all BS. They lied as much as they could to get my money. Now I’m stuck.

The support staff gets back to you within a day which is nice but they never have any worthwhile answers. In fact, on several occassions, they specifically said that even though the feature is promoted on their website, they don’t actually have it. For example, want your site in English and Spanish? Forget it. They say they can have more than one language but they can’t. Lies!

Want worthwhile SEO? Good luck with that! You won’t get it in multiple languages either.

My advice: STAY AWAY from Pinnacle Cart and save yourself a headache and lots of money. $10,000 out of my pocket I discovered that I was paying to build their platform because of their shortcomings when so many other carts would have had the features I wanted right from the start.

Custom development:
I paid $38,000 for custom web development. Contract was signed in March 2013. Work was to be finished June 7th. By June 7th they weren’t finished. A couple weeks later Mike Rose announced they were all finished. (In spite of the fact that there was zero communication with me regarding the development). Lo and behold, they’d only done a small fraction of all the work. Mike said that “he didn’t know” the rest was supposed to be done. Whatever. They proceeded to do a sloppy job at the rest of the project. Mike Blum said they were pulling in extra resources to get the project finished asap. Well. It’s now the end of August and the whole project is still not finished. Just a few half-baked pieces here are there. My company is suffering very much since we have no website / no sales.

Communication:
There seems to be no communication in the Pinnacle Cart company – not among staff, nor with clients. Everything about the project was laid out with Kyle in March in much detail. But when it came to do the work, Mike Rose seemed to be completely out of the loop. Furthermore, the supervisor Mike Blum outright admitted to me in a three-hour phone conversation that “he had no idea the amount of work that was involved; he thought that it was a simple matter of ‘design and data import’.” Well, good grief, for $38,000?!

Design:
Now let’s talk about design. It also took way longer than initial promises. The design staff couldn’t seem to get the elements necessary together. So many conversations with Valerie Jackson about how we would like things done. Emails with pictures to explain it. Online examples. It took them so many redos to finally get it more or less right. The Facebook and Twitter designs looked whipped together like something my 8-year-old nephew could have done – didn’t match the main site at all. The design was supposed to take 4 weeks. It’s now been 5 months and it’s still not done. I haven’t seen anything about the mobile site design yet.

Accounting department.
There is no way I can log in and see my history of charges. I contacted the accounting department and they email me to “log in and view history”. But there is nothing there when I log in. I had to finally send them a screenshot of their own log in page to convince them and they finally realized that indeed there is no “view history”. After that I just gave up and dug around in my Visa statements to figure it out myself.

Pinnacle has been a 6-month headache so far.
They’ve charged $38,000 and haven’t delivered
You have to hound them constantly: “Are you getting things done? Are you getting things done?”
They constantly promise: We should have something for you by this evening. We should have something for you by tomorrow.
I’ve had to make a new contract with a company called “volusion.com” – I’m having a MUCH better experience with my new provider.
Meanwhile, PinnacleCart still hasn’t delivered, and we have begun legal proceedings with the bank to recover our losses.

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